One of the most difficult choices I faced in writing LILY OF THE NILE: A Novel of Cleopatra’s Daughter, was in deciding how to portray the death of Cleopatra The Great. Though the exact cause of her death is in some dispute, I ultimately decided to go with the consensus of ancient sources: Serpenticide.
It’s hard for a modern reader to understand how a mother of four (or three, if her son Caesarion had already been killed at the time), might off herself and leave those children to fend for themselves against the Roman conqueror. But Cleopatra had known Romans all her life, and likely understood the politics of the situation better than we do. She knew, for example, that Rome had a history of fostering royal orphans of vanquished foes. In fact, she likely knew Juba II, just such an orphan. The son of a Berber king who fought against Rome, Juba was fostered in the Julian family, educated and ultimately rewarded with a kingdom to rule. And why not? His rebel father was dead and he was thoroughly Romanized.
After Cleopatra’s defeat, that’s the best future that she could have hoped for when it came to her children, which may have led her to the conclusion that her children were better off if she was out of the picture. If that’s what she was thinking when she took her own life, then she succeeded, because, as my novels detail, her daughter would go on to be the most powerful client queen in the empire of Augustus…